ARTS ABROAD

ARTS ABROAD; 20th-Century Latin American Art Finally Gets a Home

By Clifford Krauss

Published: November 20, 2001

BUENOS AIRES, Nov. 19—
Bogotá has a fine museum to display Fernando Botero, while Mexico City has great public palaces to exhibit Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. But for too long Latin America's 20th-century masters of painting have lacked a permanent home in which to be viewed and appreciated together.

That vacuum is being filled by the new Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, better known as Malba, its acronym in Spanish. It opened in September as a welcome respite for a city suffering through its longest and deepest recession in generations.

With 228 pieces by 80 artists, the collection is particularly rich in the modern paintings of Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, Cuba and of course Argentina. But nearly every Latin American country and important style of the last 100 years is represented. And by displaying works in chronological order, the museum shows how Latin American artists began the 20th century closely following the rules and trends of Europe before slowly breaking out with their own themes and styles.

The core of the museum is the collection of Eduardo Costantini, 55, an Argentine financier, property developer and philanthropist, who began buying paintings 31 years ago. The collection won accolades five years ago when it was exhibited at the Fine Arts Museum here, and since then it has toured Uruguay, Brazil and Spain.

In 1998 Mr. Costantini began construction on a large plot on elegant Figueroa Alcorta Avenue around the block from his home. The building has turned out to be a triumph of natural sunlight over structure. Its white walls, stone, glass and stainless steel are elegantly understated, highlighting the paintings and sculptures by not getting in the way.

''The museum is important because it establishes Latin American art as one of most original and fertile sources of modern art,'' said Alberto Giudici, an Argentine arts writer. ''Of course you see the strong influence of the European vanguard in these paintings, but the museum demonstrates what a rich re-creation Latin American artists made mixing European Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism and abstractionism with pre-Colombian Indian and colonial motifs to create something new.''

Latin America's turbulent history is about the uneasy mixing of the Spanish with the indigenous population and black slaves during the three-century colonial period. That great synthesis and struggle for identity, known as mestizaje, is also what has distinguished the region's arts since the 16th century, when Peruvian Indian painters produced Baroque paintings of Jesus and his disciples appearing as Indians and eating guinea pig at the Last Supper.

The Malba exhibition shows how the 20th century joined this idiosyncratic Hispanic heritage with French, Italian, German and finally American influences. But the festivals, folklore and colors in the portraits and landscapes remain firmly Latin American throughout.

Agustín Arteaga, the founding director of the museum, said that the institution was intended to give ''a global vision'' of modern Latin American art ''and provide a space for the study and analysis of the Latin American arts of the 20th century and the present.''

Mr. Arteaga, a 43-year-old Mexican architect and art historian, added that Latin American art should be seen ''as more than just a fragment'' of Western art. ''We are a part of Western civilization that sometimes changes the international scenario,'' he said in an interview.

One artist who is highlighted at Malba is Joaquín Torres-García, an Uruguayan who studied and worked in Spain, France, Belgium and the United States, making himself a melting pot of international trends while working and exchanging ideas with the likes of Antonio Gaudí and Piet Mondrian. He combined American urban symbols, European Surrealism, abstractionism and Cubism with Latin American earth colors and primitivism to form a new movement he called constructive universalism that spread across the Southern Cone in the 1920's and 30's.

One of the signature pieces in the collection, a 1942 self-portrait by Frida Kahlo posing with a parrot and monkey before a background of giant sprays of wheat, is rich with symbolism. Her hair is braided in a style popular among midwives of the mountains of rural Puebla province, and her blouse is Indian, either of Nahuatl or Huastec origin. There can be no doubt that this is a Mexican painting.

A tour of the Malba begins very differently, with several artists from the beginning of the last century whose work bears strong resemblance to European contemporaries like Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Faustino Brughetti and Valentín Thibón de Libian, both Argentines, and Carlos Federico Sáez of Uruguay, all trained in Italy or France, are clearly imitators. Even a 1915 portrait of the intellectual Ramón Gómez de la Serna by Diego Rivera -- one of the prize possessions of the museum -- may easily be mistaken for a work by Braque.

Among these early modern stylists, however, the work of a very original Uruguayan named Pedro Figari stands out and is well represented at Malba. Figari used his artistry as a means of rescuing Uruguay's rich black heritage with evocative portraits of Candomblé religious dances in colonial patios and on the pampa. He is receiving increasing acclaim in Latin American art circles as a favorite son who did not have to look to the Paris salon for inspiration.

By the post-World War I years, as the Malba collection shows, European artists and intellectuals -- most notably André Breton -- began to come to Latin America to find inspiration, and the cultural interchange became a richer two-way process. Surrealism bloomed in Latin American painting just as it did in Latin America literature.

In the 1928 painting ''Abaporu,'' the Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral, a student of Fernand Léger, fused Surrealism with Brazilian sensuality and mythology in her depiction of a nude, distorted woman contemplating a cactus flower.

By the 1930's and beyond, the Malba exhibition shows, Latin American artists found much of their inspiration in politics and the social problems of their people.

A 1931 pencil-and-ink on cardboard by Siqueiros called ''Accident in the Mine'' is a work of stark realism that he sketched while under house arrest for his Communist activities in the Mexican mining town of Taxco. The work is historically important because it came at a time when Siqueiros was experimenting, with the prodding of the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, with new techniques that would create more movement in his later murals.

A Siqueiros disciple, Argentina's Antonio Berni, is richly displayed at Malba, and his work show how the graphic techniques of muralism were employed in smaller works to create characters that appear to be larger than life. In a 1934 painting titled ''Demonstration,'' hungry laborers demanding work and bread look as if they are poised to storm out of the piece and overwhelm the viewer.

Arguably Argentina's most important 20th-century painter, Berni took new forms in the 1960's and 1970's using collages to depict the street life of the down and out. Other modern works by other artists protest American militarism, the local military dictatorships of the 1970's and 1980's and the impersonality of contemporary life.

Malba's weakness comes from a lack of depth. Several countries with rich artistic traditions, like Colombia and Venezuela, are not yet well represented.

''We intend to grow,'' said Mr. Arteaga, the museum director. ''I can give you a long list of artists and countries, but I'd rather not speculate on acquisitions and drive up prices in the market.''

Photo: The Malba, in Buenos Aires. (Horacio Paone for The New York Times)